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Math and Stat majors attend, present, and win an award at regional research conference

A total of 10 Elon students attended the 10th Annual Regional Mathematics and Statistics Conference on Saturday, November 1, 2014, at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro.

Nicole Soltz '17. Nicole's presentation, "Counting roots and Galois groups" won an award for "Outstanding Student Presentation" by an undergraduate.

Four of the students presented their research at the conference.

Erin Donahue '15 spoke on "Looking at Kurtosis: Is my data normal?". Erin's research was mentored by associate professor of statistics Laura Taylor.

Maddie Edwards '15 gave two talks. Her talk "Identification of Transcription Factor Programs under Methylation Control during Brain Development" was based on research conducted this past summer at an REU at Virginia Tech. Maddie's other talk "Derivative Sign Patterns for Infinitely Differentiable Functions in Three Dimensions" was based on current research mentored by professor of mathematics Jeff Clark.

Robin French '15 presented her talk "A new algorithm for Galois groups of quintic polynomials", which was mentored by assistant professor of mathematics Chad Awtrey.

Nicole Soltz '17 delivered her award-winning talk "Counting Roots and Galois Groups", also mentored by Awtrey. Based on conference judges' evaluations, Nicole was the recipient of an award for Outstanding Student Presentation by an undergraduate. This was the second time in three years that an Elon student won such an award. The first time was in 2012, when Alison Miller '13 did so for her talk "A Comparison of Seminonparametric and Nonparametric Survival Estimation", which was mentored by associate professor of statistics Kirstie Doehler.